It really was 40 years ago...

....or thereabouts, that my dad woke me up, brought me downstairs and
sat me in front of the black and white telly, to watch grainy black
and white pictures of Neil Armstrong's 'one small step'.

Weird how science fiction is so wrong most of the time[1]. We all
thought there'd be people living on the moon by now - instead the
whole thing fizzled to a halt within 4 years. I really hope serious
space exploration gets going again in my lifetime.

 

Be another place to stick speed cameras, I suppose...

 

did the footnote disappear into a worm hole?

 

Turbo + nitrous on the Busa?

 

It was faked, move on and get over it.

I believed it for a while but when I realised that the mighty USA
couldn't beat a bunch of slopes in the jungle of SE Asia I knew they
hadn't put anyone on the moon.

Not x-posted because TOG's on holiday.

 

Heh, my Dad was trying to get out of visiting Mum and newborn me in the
hospital, so he could watch it on the telebox.

Oh, the footnote thief has been around your gaff.

 

Not if these pictures are to be believed:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.h
tml

 

I wonder if they'd never made capricorn 1, there wouldn't be any fake
moonlanding loonies...

CAPRICORN 1 WAS A FILM! A FICTION! NOT A DOCUMENTARY!
There's a difference.
--
| | Windows95 (noun): 32 bit extensions and a |
| | graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit |
| Andrew Halliwell BSc | operating system originally coded for a 4 bit |
| in |microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company, that|
| Computer Science | can't stand 1 bit of competition. |

 

I was glued to the telly apart from when fucking Corrie was spoiling it.

The mind-boggling cost of it, the utter disinterest shown by the public,
and the political reason for it had fizzled out with the accomplishment.

Me too. Show that Sgt Pepper a thing or two.

 

Yeah. I was going to write something about how SF had completely
failed to predict the things that had happened, like ubiquitous
communications, GPS, etc.

 

Arthur C Clarke came pretty close I reckon even back in the 60s..

JB

 

Really? I'm geniunely surprised. Not trying to start an argument
(though I am happy to hear your pov), but I don't really give much of
a **** - except that we do some work for NASA, so that is A Good
Thing.

 

Photoshop. You can tell because the grassy knoll has been removed.

 

I was six at the time and don't remember it! I remember later missions,
though. It was one of airfix's greatest achievements too.

 

Errrm, it is. We have two extra system probes, others in orbit about
Saturnm Venus and Mars, yet another on it's way to P67, a Mercury
orbiter in developement, at least 3 monitoring the Sun and a host
looking at the Earth and it's environs including the moon.

Ah! You mean the wetware ones, nah, to high a mass budget.

Mind you, I thought this was *awesome*, arguably a public footpath on
the Moon.

http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/?archives/76-LROC’s-First-Look-at-the-Apollo-Landing-Sites.html

 

SF says much more about people's current preoccupations than it does about
the future. Consider all the post-apocalyptic stories written in the cold
war (or indeed the fantastic scene of the nuclear destruction of LA in
Terminator 2).

My personal favourite example of this is Olaf Stapledon's "Last and First
Men", written in 1930 and purporting to be a history of the next several
million years, which totally failed to forsee the second world war.

 

"Although thematically Capricorn One is a typical 1970s government-
conspiracy thriller with similarities to Hyams's subsequent film
Outland, the story was inspired by allegations that the Apollo Moon
landings were a hoax."

http://www.sptimes.com/2002/09/29/Floridian/Lunar_lunacy.shtml

 

Pah! July 20th will now forever be remembered as the date that Freddie
Flintoff took a five-fer at Lord's, during the Ashes series of 2009.

I just hope that it doesn't turn out to be in vain.

 

It has been reported that during the Apollo 16 landing, television
networks had to take complaints about the interruption to `I love
Lucy'.

 

I didn't expect you to.